MARTIN SPINELLI

Martin Spinelli began a career in radio as a teenager. In his twenties as a reporter, anchor and producer in Buffalo, New York, he produced award-winning news features for National Public Radio as well as the nationally acclaimed literary series LINEbreak. In the mid-1990s he produced cutting-edge pieces heard on innovative stations around the world, as well as on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Both his benchmark radio art series Radio Radio and LINEbreak are included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Television and Radio in New York while all of his radio work and writing are archived in the Martin Spinelli Collection at the University at Buffalo Library.

Martin holds degrees from the University of Sussex and Virginia Tech as well as a PhD from Buffalo. He was the founder of the Academic Radio Program at the City University of New York at Brooklyn College where he produced the AIDS-informational soap Welcome to America broadcast on Radio Africa International. His many essays about media art and history have been published in anthologies as well as journals like Postmodern Culture, Convergence and Object.

In September 2006 Martin’s life was transformed when his wife was killed and his son nearly killed by a lorry driver who fell asleep at the wheel. Martin’s first book, the memoir After the Crash, tells the story of their recovery. He now writes inspirational stories and is a part-time lecturer in Media, Film and Music at the University of Sussex. But his most important and rewarding occupation is father to the most amazing boy in Britain, Lio Spinelli.

LATEST BOOK: AFTER THE CRASH

The heart-rending story of a young boy's miraculous recovery from severe brain damage and the loss of his mother following a car accident

'In the pit of my stomach, as I kissed my four-year-old son Lio and my darling wife Sasha goodbye, I knew something was up. By that evening, the police had told me about the crash.

Lio's bright and talented mother was killed that day, and he narrowly escaped the same fate. But instead of it being an ending for us, the crash was a beginning.

Lio's miraculous recovery from severe brain damage and a coma defied medical science. As I witnessed his astonishing journey - from intensive care to school and 10 Downing Street - and fought to pull him back from the edge of death and the loss of his mother, I found real purpose and meaning for the first time in my life.'

After the Crash is much more than a moving personal story. It's a handbook for dealing with disaster, not just surviving it but mastering it and using it to transform your life for the better.